[78-L] ^White Christmas

[David Lennick]

Here you go, from the man who knows.

--

There was no direct service from Miami to Vermont, nor is there now.  They 
would have had to change trains at New York's Penn Station, which is where all 
the Florida trains terminated and originated; there was no Florida service 
available out of Grand Central Terminal.

The fastest trip from Miami to NY Penn Station would have been on a name train 
such as the East Coast Champion or the Silver Meteor, which would have taken 24 
to 25 hours.  A connecting train from Penn Station would have then taken them 
to Vermont, which would have added another five to 10 hours, dependent on the 
final destination within the state.

The two pieces of stock footage used in that portion of the film are a Santa Fe 
San Diegan on the coast south of Los Angeles and a Southern Pacific secondary 
long-haul train with several mail and express cars right behind the 
locomotives.  Neither railway ever got anywhere near Florida or Vermont.

*/Greg Gormick/*
*/On Track Strategies/*
*/Oshawa, Ontario/*
*/  and/*
*/Studio City, California/*


On 12/25/2018 3:27 PM, Mark Bardenwerper wrote:
> On 12/25/2018 1:57 PM, Rodger Holtin 78-L wrote:
>> Merry Christmas, 78-L!
>>
>> OK, back to business.
>>
>> Even my grandkids believe the holidays are properly validated by watching White Christmas. I consider myself a success. However there are crucial questions that I cannot answer and so I turn to my friends.
>>
>> In the early scenes of the Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye movie White Christmas, they are apparently playing a show in Florida. Wallace and Davis have two train tickets for New York.  They show the girls in the Pullman sleeper and Wallace and Davis spend the night "in a drafty old club car."  How long would that trip have been in 1954?  Overnight or two nights? More?  Less?
>>
> This was just postwar, so the trains likely were not yet onto the
> free-fall of the fifties. It was possibly a two-day trip, with a
> changeover in DC. There were expresses coming out of Florida with
> perhaps one stop per state. Coast trains went through Penn Station, just
> as the modern Vermonter does now. But then there were trains running
> north farther west. Two days would be a stretch. Not at all possible
> nowadays, though the route exists.
>